WANDERLUST SUNSET ❖ JANUARY 2015 27 opening up—the five sequential yells that appear on the “Intro” track of his second posthumous album, From the Muddy Banks of the Wishkah. The one we all listened to knowing that in early April 1994, 27-year-old Kurt Don- ald Cobain took his own life with a 20-gauge shotgun. The mural is one of a handful of official Cobain trib- utes that have sprung up the past few years. On State 12, there’s now a sign that reads welcome to aberdeen. come as you are, a reference to a Nirvana song. Co- bain’s favorite Aberdeen haunt—the underside of the Young Street Bridge—has officially become Kurt Cobain Landing, a well-tended pocket park that annually draws about 5,000 solemn visitors from all over the world. Meanwhile, last year on Cobain’s birthday, February 20, the mayor of Aberdeen marked the city’s first-ever Kurt Cobain Day by unveiling a concrete statue of the musi- cian. “We hope,” Simpson told a rapt audience, “that Aberdeen will be just as big as Graceland.” Certainly, the town needed to reinvent itself. In Aber- deen’s circa-1900 heyday, when its canneries and logging operations thrived, downtown was a crime-ridden hive of brothels and saloons. The economy never fully bounced back after the Northwest timber industry all but died in the mid-1980s. Still, the mayor’s posthumous embrace of Co- bain is jarring. For 20 years now, Aberdeen has largely shunned him, even as fans have trickled into town to roam the same streets and riverbanks their idol once did. For one weekend, I’d join them, riding my bicycle along the flat streets of Aber- deen, through a sleepy town where, it seems, ev- eryone remembers Kurt. “Kurt used to play in my yard when he was little,” my waitress, Sue Muhlhauser, tells me, as she refills my $1 cup of coffee at the VFW hall. “I could prob- ably sell the blades of grass if I wanted to.” I’ve stopped by for a ham-and-eggs breakfast, and also to take the town’s temperature on its evolv- ing relationship with Cobain. “I don’t care for his music,” a woman at my table intones. “But then again, I’m a country-western person myself.” Terry Holderman, quartermaster of VFW Post 224, introduces himself. “Celebrating Kurt is a good thing,” he says. “There’s such creativity in his music. I think Aberdeen needs to hold on to that, because for a while it felt like we just gave up.” We’re outside now, and I notice a man standing nearby, smoking a cigarette. John Bryant works as the Post’s janitor. He, too, knew Cobain. “Oh yeah, Kurt could be sarcastic,” he says, taking a long, con- templative drag. “I was one of the guys old enough to buy beer for him and his friends. But he was a good kid. He just pushed the envelope a little too far.” I leave the VFW and pedal past Rosevear’s Music Center, where Kurt took his only guitar lessons. I keep going past the elegant Aberdeen library, then along modest residential streets to an old armory that’s now The Aberdeen Museum of History. Inside, a concrete statue of Cobain sits, a bit incongruously, amid an array of old fire engines and Model T cars. Sculptor and onetime high school teacher Randi Hubbard created the statue in 1994, not long after the musician died, shaping it with the help of local high school students at her husband’s muffler shop. “It was a raw time,” Hubbard tells me when she meets me at the museum. The statue was Hubbard’s attempt to bring about healing. But when she tried to display it publicly back then, the Aberdeen City Council balked. Concrete Kurt looks larger than life-size and unnervingly stiff; his fingers are rigid as they splay on his guitar, and a single tear streams from his eye. “I think we all have a little Kurt Cobain in us,” she says. “I knew him when he was a boy. He lived near me, and he was precious. He played with a foster child who lived in the neighborhood. He just loved the real people in this world.” We talk for maybe an hour, and by the time we finish, Hubbard is focusing her bottomless maternal affection on me: “I can’t let you ride your bike back to the motel,” she says. “It’s just too far.” So we throw my bike into her husband’s pickup and drive there, a flat mile, with my bike rattling in the back atop a heap of rusted-out mufflers. Mayor Bill Simp- son: “We hope that Aberdeen will be just as big as Graceland.” 28 JANUARY 2015 ❖ SUNSET Travel